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Saturday, June 16, 2012

"A boy student...

...at a vocational school wore a cross around his neck.The school authorities told him 'You'd better take off that cross. Otherwise, you're banned from campus, and what's more, you can't take part in any training programmes.' The boy refused, and was expelled." Sound familiar? It is actually a quote from Stanislaw Dziwisz' A Life with Karol, his moving account of his service with the man who became the world's first Polish Pope. The incident he describes here took place in the late 1960s, when Poland was under Communist rule and we in the West used to hear, from time to time, about the repression of the Church there and the courage shown by Catholics. Six decades on, and here in the West...